Continuing with this series, I going to go over my shopping process. Basically I was prompted by my cell carrier T-Mobile that I was eligible for a phone upgrade. That excited me because it had been a year since I bought an unlocked international phone, the Samsung G-810 camera phone. Solid phone, great call quality, had a 5.0 megapixel camera on one end. The OS was Nokia’s Symbian oddly enough, had basic mobile web capabilities and wi-fi. Good phone, but I was getting bored by it. I thought I would use the camera a lot more than I ended up using it for.
So there it was when I logged into my T-Mobile account, the list of phones available to upgrade to with discounted pricing. G-1, Blackberry Curve, and the Samsung Memoir were the ones that stood out to me at first. It met the reqs I listed in the previous volume. I was leaning more toward the Memoir since it was more of the same as what I had, only with a touchscreen (that and a freakin crazy 8.0 megapixel camera).
As I was looking over my T-Mobile options, my wife, the T-Mobile hater, stated she did not want to stay with T-Mobile for another two years. I’m not sure why she hates T-Mobile, whenever I ask she just says “I just don’t.” Haha so yeah, no pushing that further. But seriously, I had no problem staying with T-Mobile because I have been with them for so long. She has always wanted to go to AT&T because she was with them before we had a family plan together.
So, just for kicks, I looked at what AT&T had to offer as far as phones. Of course the iPhone was one of the ones catching my eye, along with a couple of Samsung phones in the Eternity and Epix, and the HTC Fuze was also a big one that I was looking at. All those had the functionality and a little bit of the fun I wanted in a phone.
So I weighed things in my head. I did stay with T-Mobile since a lot of my friends and my parents and brother had them so I saved on minute with the free mobile-to-mobile. But over the years most of my friends who had T-Mobile had since switched to AT&T…even my parents and brother on their plan switched just last year. And all of my wife’s family is on AT&T, so it would make sense to switch if I did. So I kept that in mind during my phone shopping, that I needed to keep it open to switching and just settle with a phone that I liked.
And even more so, for similar phones the calling plan with features were within $5-10 of each other between T-Mobile and AT&T.
So I went to several websites like wirefly.com and letstalk.com along with t-mobile.com and wireless.att.com to narrow down my phone selection on pricing and what I liked. I also hit up cnet.com and amazon.com heavily for both expert and user reviews. After viewing review, I hit up a few stores both T-Mobile and AT&T to play with the phones myself.
For a bargain, my eye was drawn to the Eternity. On letstalk.com for 2 of them it was free after mail-in rebate (first one was free, the second $99.99 with $100 mail-in rebate). Eternity had good reviews and met most of my reqs, even had some extras like mobile TV and navigation. So there was one option.
I did like the Fuze, attractive, had a pull-out keyboard since I’m more used to a keypad than a touchscreen. Also had a solid camera with flash. I know not a lot of people are big fans of Windows Mobile but I kind of like it, with the limited experience I’ve had with it. Pricing ranged anywhere between free with mail-in rebate to $299 with new contract. So there was another option.
And if I were to stick with T-Mobile, the Memoir was my pick. The G-1 is a great concept, but I didn’t really like the look of it or the design of the keyboard. The Memoir was a sexy touchscreen/camera. Beast of a camera with video capabilities, oh and it did have a phone on it. T-Mobile was offering it to me for $249 with 2-year contract extension. So yeah.
But one thing came to me while I was searching for a phone. I thought about it and thought about it. Why did I feel like I needed a new phone every year? Not that anything was wrong with the phones I had previously, they all still make pretty decent calls. My phone 3 years ago the PEBL still made awesome calls before my wife broke it. What was drawing me to want to get a phone every year.
And I reached an epiphany. I wanted a toy. A new toy to play with every year. Every year it would come down to me getting bored with my current phone. It’s not that I didn’t like it, but I knew all about the phone and already used up all the features it had to offer. There was no real way to add onto the phone unless I bought a game or something to put on it, which occasionally I did. But each phone would reach a certain point where I could do no more with it.
And that is where my decision came in. I needed a toy that had so much on it and so much you could add onto it later on. A toy that was functional as a tool of communication and information, but also awesome to play with.
And so it was the iPhone (!) and the switch to AT&T (to my wife’s delight, she ended up with the Eternity).
In the next volume, I’ll go over my first week with the phone and the new service.
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